Last night we got our stuff ready to pack, which means the whole moving thing is happening soon. People are coming over tonight to help us pack (thanks, people!) and we'll be living out of boxes for a while...the movers come for real on Saturday. Until we get settled in at the house we may be somewhat incommunicado, so call me on my cell phone (or better yet, call djedi on his since mine seems a bit unreliable). Moving brings out the worst in me, so I will likely be crabby and irritable and unhelpful for a while, so being incommunicado isn't the worst thing in the world. (sorry, people around me!)

Played a little Smash Bros last night - did the easy job of unlocking (spoiler alert: highlight to read) Snake , and then djedi got up to 29% in Subspace Emissary (the adventure mode). Next up to unlock I think will be (spoiler) Captain Falcon , so I might do that tonight. (Just kidding! Tonight is packing)

We've been trying to get cable/internet set up at the new place for a while now. We scheduled Time Warner to come out February 29 to hook it up, and the contractor guy said that the signal coming into the house was too weak and a supervisor would have to come out and look at it. Last Friday I called Time Warner to see what the deal was (the contractor said someone would call me to schedule an appointment), and luckily the woman was able to schedule an appointment for that day. So someone did come out to the house, did the same stuff as the contractor, and verified that that was indeed the problem. (not sure what the deal was there) He said engineers (I'm an engineer!) would have to work on the problem outside but I didn't need to be there or set up an appointment or anything.

So yesterday I call Time Warner to see if they know if the work's been done or when the work will be done, since we're getting awfully close to moving in. Using their nifty callback feature, I get a call 10 minutes later, and the woman said that in fact the last guy hadn't scheduled anything to be done and that someone did need to be at the house. Le sigh. So that's scheduled for Friday along with hot tub stuff.

But it's annoying to have to always call after anyone does anything to confirm what they said/actually get the next step of the process to happen.

Ah, smash brothers. Last night I beat the 100-man melee after around an hour of frustration (at 4-5 minutes an attempt). I used Meta Knight for his combination of puffiness (to avoid cheap deaths) and a sword. My failures were almost all the same way - once I was down to the last 20 or so, they would always come 5 at a time and be very aggressive, and by that point I'd have a lot of damage and so when I got hit I'd fly off the platform. And then I'd try to get back on and it would be almost impossible with five targets to avoid. For my winning attempt I was much more aggressive about stopping them from grouping up, and it worked! Next up: 15 minute melee! (ugh)

I realized yesterday I was trying to convince myself independently that a) it wasn't that far from our apartment to the house (so people coming to game nights won't be horribly inconvenienced) b) it was a long way from work to the house (so that we're moving closer to work). Since work is between apartment and house, these are incompatible!

Bush vetoes bill banning waterboarding - I know it's been a little hard to follow, and I've kinda stopped paying attention, but the official policy of the US and our president is to allow torture. This is very sad.

I have looked into the future and lo, it is good, and takes a while to relearn controls for the Wiimote, and there is lots of Japanese. Final Smashes are lots of fun and good but not game-breaking, Captain Olimar is fun to play. All is well.

from the barrel of a gun
Mood: cheerful
Music: The Simpsons Movie: The Music - "Trapped Like Carrots"
Posted on 2007-08-01 09:25:00Tags: wiiWords: 204

Austin trip was fun. We got a lead on a really nice apartment complex that's going to turn into condos, one of which we might buy if we can afford. (don't know the prices yet) It's right off of Far West, a block or two from where we lived before. Ratings are good.

Simpsons movie - very good. Like watching a long episode, which is all one can hope for. Watching 50 minutes of random Simpsons clips before, then drinking Duff, eating a Ribwich and donuts heighten the experience. Thanks Alamo Drafthouse!

Texas game night - man, I miss those things. It was great to see everyone again, even if it was a little intimidating. (big shindigs don't happen up here)

Summer musical - we stopped by and got to see people and the new theatre. Good stuff. Can't wait to try out next year!

Mario Strikers Charged - a lot of fun so far. Nothing like soccer with red shells and fire pits and random bits of electricity.

Work - stress came yesterday but most everything has cleared up now.

Free time - I want to play WoW, Mario Strikers Charged, program a few things, learn more Go, etc. It's getting a little excessive.

It is super cold here! I'm at home waiting for the cable people to come (they said 8-12, which of course means I just got a call at 11:40 that they're on their way. *sigh*), and wow. It's 34 degrees outside. And maybe it'll snow sometime in the next week! That would be awesome.

Being at home this morning, I accomplished almost nothing useful. Which is not altogether bad. Finished a book I was reading, played some Wii Sports and tweaked my WoW settings to get more fps, which is always good.

Speaking of Wii Sports, I recently made Pro in baseball. Woohoo! It's getting really hard, though - I've finally learned to lay off the bad pitches some. But the pitches are getting tougher - one game started me off with a 100 mph fastball (!) followed by a 69 mph screwball. How am I supposed to adjust between those speeds?

When I woke up Tuesday the Wii disc slot was glowing blue, so I turned it on and there was a message from Nintendo that they had released the Forecast Channel. I did the system update and played with it quickly before work. Now that I've had more time with it it's actually pretty darn neat (relevant Penny Arcade strip). Yeah, it's just the weather, but here's why it's super cool:

- The background music is very calming. Plus, when you show a forecast of "rain" there's a faint rain noise that plays :-)

- It has the forecast for your area, but you can show a very nicely drawn globe (pictures here) with the current weather (or today's high/low, etc.), and you can spin the globe around by grabbing it and it's fun.

- Apparently Madden '07 uses the data from that to find the weather conditions when you play a game. Neat!

- Obviously when you zoom out fewer and fewer cities are shown. I discovered this by accident, but when you start at Texas and zoom out eventually you get to a point where Houston is shown and not Dallas!!!! Hahahahaha!!! Take that, Dallas!!

Here's a festive screenshot I took in WoW - notice the reindeer mount and Santa-like hat :-)

Hmm, Friday was quiet on LJ and today seems to be update day. So I'll continue the trend!

Last night djedi and I went over to a new friend's place to play Wii. It was fun! Although, a lot of what we played was Monkey Ball minigames, and these don't seem to be up to the caliber of previous versions. There are some good ones in there, though - the key is avoiding the stupid or impossible to control ones.

This morning was dodgeball! Unfortunately it was another stupid 9:00 start, but I was dedicated enough to get up on time. :-) Anyway, our first match was against a team that only have five players (six play at a time), so we went six on five against them. We did well at first, holding about even with them, but they ended up winning 10-4. Had some good games, though, including trading "I got you outs" with a cute muscled guy on the other team. He was better than me, though...

The second match was against "The Hasselhoffs" (yeah, really). They even had matching shirts with David Hasselhoff's face surrounded by the text "Don't Hassle the Hoff". As could be expected of a team that has uniforms, they crushed us 14-2 (and the last game we won because they were screwing around). One guy on their team even made a phenomenal catch - he was on the ground and caught the ball between his legs. It was unreal. Also, I got hit by a stinger (the small balls that hurt!) twice dangerous close to the crotch area. Luckily, no permanent damage was done.

Came back home and did some programming and played some more Wii Sports. I've already reached Pro level at tennis and I'm getting closeish with baseball! It's a lot of fun.

Played some WoW...had a slightly frustrating MC run because the server reset twice, so we had to basically start over twice. Luckily we weren't too far in, and the rest of the run went relatively well, including our first downing of Ragnaros after the patch.

Just went to djedi's office's holiday party - it was a lot of fun! We played ping-pong and air hockey and watched some football. I think my Wii Tennis is helping my ping-pong game. Also, I want to be warmed up for facing destroyerj come New Year's :-)

Finally fixed the frustrating LJBackup problem over which I almost killed a hard drive. It turns out when you're using prototype.js to do an Ajax call, you have to use "post" as the method, not "POST" (even though "POST" is supposed to be more compliant, or something). Anyway, making decent progress and I'm hoping to wrap things up before we leave on Friday!

Hope everyone's holiday season is going well. Only one week (give or take) until Christmas!

So I got a Wii on Friday, and as you'd expect, djedi and I spent a long time playing it. But maybe not in ways you'd expect!

So we unpacked it and set it up, etc. I had played with a Wii Remote (i.e. controller) in stores before, but it's a lot easier to control it when you're at a "normal" distance from the TV and sitting down. The main interface is really a pleasure to play with - you get a slight rumble every time you roll over a button, which is a nice touch.

Anyway, the first thing we did (after updating the firmware) is create Miis for ourselves. A Mii is a little graphical representation of yourself - you get to choose the hair, face shape, etc., etc. I'm not very good at such things but it was kinda fun, and the results are at least recognizable!

After friending omega697 and others, we played around with Wii Sports (the pack-in title). It's kinda neat because you play as your Mii :-) There are five sports that come with it - here they are, ordered by how much I liked it:

Baseball: I had a ton of fun with baseball. It's fairly simplistic - you only pitch on defense and hit on offense (fielding and baserunning are automatic). But, man, swinging the remote like a bit to hit is a freaking blast. Pitching is also fun - you control the kind of pitch (fastball, curveball, screwball, and splitter (I think)), the location (by using the D-pad) and how hard it's thrown by, well, making a throwing motion with the Wiimote. My right arm is quite sore from all the throwing. But in a good way! I haven't tried it two-player since we played it the first time (and didn't really know what we were doing), but it's fun against the computer!

Tennis: Another deceptively simple one, in that you don't move your Mii, but just swing at the appropriate time. But you control the direction and speed, as well as spin (which I haven't quite mastered) by swinging the Wiimote like a racket. This worked well with two people (every match is doubles, so we both controlled two Miis each), but I bet it would be a lot of fun with four.

Bowling: Here you control where you stand, the direction you throw, as well as speed and spin. The results are fairly realistic, which means that I'm not terribly good. There are some fun challenge modes, though, even if my ball always curves to the left...

Golf: Meh. Hold the Wiimote like a golf club and swing. The problem with this one is that it's really hard to hit the ball softly, which means putting is a nightmare for me.

Boxing: This one looks neat, but the game don't seem to pick up the controls very accurately. Also, it's incredibly tiring, at least the way I was swinging around wildly...

The two games we had bought were Super Monkey Ball and the new Zelda. We haven't started the new Zelda yet, but we did bust out a little bit of Monkey Ball. Overall, I'm a little disappointed. The main mode (you tilt the Wiimote to move the level) is OK but I have more dexterity in my thumbs then I do in my whole hand, so everything seems harder. (and I hear the levels get crazy hard quickly) But, I really bought it for the 50(!) party games. We've only had time to play through 15-20 or so, and for some of those we were calibrating the Wiimote wrong, which may explain why many of them just didn't seem to work at all. I guess we'll have to reevaluate them... (we've been scoring them out of 5 so we can remember which the good ones are, since there seem to be plenty of duds and uninteresting ones) Anyway, poor control leads to a lot of frustration.

We also bought the original NES Zelda through the Virtual Console and played through it.(passed it last night!) It's a lot of fun - good game, and it is more fun playing it on a controller and TV screen than through an emulator on the computer. It's emulated very well - even the slowdowns when too many enemies come on the screen. For added fun, a third party will be making adapters so you can play the Wii with NES or SNES controllers, which is kinda neat.

Anyway, the gist of it is that I've enjoyed it a lot, and I'm looking forward to trying it out with more people come the holidays, assuming I can find two more Wiimotes and nunchucks. I'm still in the gimmicky phase (anything motion sensing is cool!) so we'll have to see how it fares with Zelda, etc.

On a non-Wii note, I hope to have LJBackup finished before I leave for the holidays. (next Friday) A bit optimistic, but I did some more stuff on it this weekend so there isn't too much left to do...

Our story begins earlier in the week. In my usual calls to local stores, two different EB Games said they were scheduled to get more Wii's in Thursday or Friday. This was exciting news! Yesterday I drove out to a few of them around noon (which is when they said their shipments usually come in) and neither one of them had gotten them. So today was to be the day!

Anyway, I figured I'd take some time off to be sure I was there. I arrived at the closest EB Games at 11:30 and there were the Wiis! And people standing around, buying them! It took me a few minutes to realize that they all had numbers, and the store guy confirmed that they had received nine, and nine numbers had been given out, so I was out of luck.

Well, crap. I was pretty unhappy at this, what with the excitement of driving there and then the letdown. I called the other EB Games I had talked to earlier in the week, and they had gotten a shipment but it had sold out. (I later heard people at that store were waiting in line at 8 AM to get their number...)

So, I decided to head up to Arundel Mills (very large mall), since I knew there were an EB Games and a Gamestop around there somewhere. Stopped by a Circuit City on the way, no dice.

Decided that the most likely places for these stores would be in the mall proper (there are lots of strip malls surrounding the actual mall, but I had driven by those before and not seen either of them), so I parked and went in. Only been there once before, and that was for a movie, so I didn't really know where I was going. Pretty quickly I stumbled across the EB Games. They had received a shipment today, but they too had sold out of them.

I was feeling angry now about this whole affair. Not that it was anyone's fault, but man it was frustrating. So I grabbed a map and found where the Gamestop was. The mall is set up like a big racetrack and I decided to take the long way around to walk off some anger (and to see the rest of the mall). Lots of stores there - stopped in the Best Buy on the way, but no Wii.

Well, I finally arrive at the Gamestop and they haven't received their daily shipment yet! The guy said it usually came in around noon, and it was like 11:50 now so I decided to hang around. Gamestop and EB Games are now owned by the same company, so the odds of there being Wii's on the shipment seemed pretty good. While I waited, I deposited my driver's license and credit card to get a Wii controller to play with the demo unit. The demo unit had a demo of Zelda, which I hadn't seen before so I thought I'd give it a shot. When I walked up to the unit, the guy next to me (at the PS3 demo unit) expressed surprise that I got the controller. (I guess he didn't realize you could ask for it at the counter) He said he was waiting for a Wii as well, and he had gotten a number earlier.

Oh. Crap. That's not a good sign. So I went back up to the counter, and (after the counter guy got off the phone) asked if they were giving out numbers for Wii's. He gave me a bit of a furtive glance and said that they were, but to keep it to myself. (I guess he didn't want a big rush of people or something) And he hands me the number 8! Since the last place had nine, I thought my odds were good.

Anyway, to pass the time I played some Zelda. Took me a minute or so to get used to the controls, but man they're pretty cool. Was still figuring things out when the UPS guy came in with a big dolly of stuff. My excitement level is through the roof at this point! So a line forms for the counter and after a minute I figure I should get in it, just in case. Talked with the woman in front of me (who had number 1! She said she had gotten there when it opened at 9 to get it...) while we waited, and lo and behold, when I got to the front I got my very own Wii! (they had gotten in 15 units, I think)

So, I can't wait to play it tonight. And I'll post my friend code so people can friend me and share their Miis and stuff. Woohoo!

Sidenote: it is very cold here. There were supposed to be isolated snow flurries last night but I didn't see any when I checked a few times. The low tonight is 20 degrees! A few days ago I noticed that, even after we got in the car (parked in a parking garage!) to go to work, djedi and I could still see our breaths. Yikes!

I put up a new version of a sample LJbackup - the only thing of note is the stats page now includes the longest posts. Interestingly, my longest posts is a friends-only meme I posted, probably because the word counting is pretty primitive and inaccurate (counting HTML tags as words, etc.)

...except for not actually getting a Wii. I got up at 6:45 this morning and went to my Target - they only had 3! Went to a different Target and they had 27 but I was 55 or so in line. I was pretty disappointed at first, but the electronics guy at Sears has been looking for one too and he was very Zen about it, which helped. Overall the people I've dealt with trying to get one have been very friendly. And there are always more on the way, and I have my list of phone numbers and when to call, etc., so I'm hoping soon will be my time.

David's sister was in town this weekend, so yesterday we saw the National Gallery of Art and walked around a ton to see the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, World War II Memorial, Vietnam Memorial, and almost saw the White House Christmas tree (well, we saw it but it hasn't been officially lit yet). Took a lot of pictures, which will go up at some point. Today we took it easier - after church we went to Annapolis to eat and look around. Found a nice little pottery store as well as a bookstore/coffee shop before we had to drop her off at the airport. When we got home I took a much-needed nap and am back to feeling pretty decent.

...and today is no exception! I woke up at 6:45 and went to a number of different stores to try to obtain a Wii, but to no avail. I really should have preordered - didn't want to because I've seen people get screwed with that. (i.e. PS3 where they don't receive enough units to cover the preorders) But there seem to be plenty of Wiis today (the first Target I went to had 120), just none went to me. I did manage to snag an extra controller and the two games we wanted, though. (new monkey ball and zelda) A gaming store near work said they're getting another shipment in Tuesday, so I'm still hopeful! Interesting Wii FAQ here.

In other news, I was tired after dodgeball yesterday (lots of running around!), and I noticed my arm kinda hurt when trying to throw. So I'm already feeling kinda sick (think it's just a mild cold or allergies at this point), and today I'm sore all over my freaking body. I didn't put two and two together until just now when I tried to do the throwing motion with my right arm and it hurt in like 8 different places. Hopefully that'll go away tomorrow.

My LJ backup project is coming along decently - I'm now downloading all posts and comments and saving them, as well as displaying some neat statistics. Things left to do:
- generate yearly archive pages, like this
- read in polls and parse and display them
- hopefully find some way to find out which posts are memories
- more neat statistics, like who you use the <lj user="whoever"> tag for most